The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training

I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.

(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)

the payouts

wait, what? I was just looking for a search engine that does least tracking and brave was recommended a few times, so I use that, but have never seen any ads or been offered any payout? Am I doing it wrong? (for the record, if they'd offered me payment to watch ads I would have never even installed it in the first place, and will now be removing it as my default on firefox)

I don't think people use Brave for any crypto stuff all that much. I use it to block ads.

When mouthing this opinion back on Reddit I got swamped with downvotes and crypto apologists immediately. But in my opinion brave is shady af and I don’t see their value over Firefox and a reasonable ad blocker, maybe a pi-hole and anti tracking.

Like a lot of things, it was good at first. Then they made it shitty.

I had small ads that I barely noticed, no need for any crypto account, and it gave me 5~10€/month to automatically send to Wikipedia (or any website I felt like paying).

Now that crypto account is mandatory it's just useless...

I still use it on a few devices but mainly because I'm too lazy to replace it by something else.

On windows the adverts are a little windows notification that pops up in the bottom right and you can ignore it or click close. I wouldn’t call that a nightmare. What do they look like for you and what platform are you using?

I don’t care about the “utility of the crypto”, it’s just free money to me. I use brave with bing to do what I already do, and I get paid in Microsoft rewards and brave crypto that I can sell. Win-win.

I don’t care about any advertisers, and I damn well aren’t sending any of them any money lol.

I thought it was supposed to be the best privacy browser but after reading these comments my view has changed completely and have switched all devices to Firefox.

I made roughly $1200 using Brave at work.

It is optional to open the ad or not and you do get paid half what you would even if you don’t view the ad. I turned on max number of adds per hour and clicked no most of the time. Took me maybe 10 seconds per hour while I was getting paid to work already. Sure the per ad money got poor over time, but at first it wasn’t so bad at first and I was making a couple bucks per day. Converted that to Bitcoin every month and that has nearly doubled in price. So if I converted to USD right now I’m at $1200 for a grand total of under 9 hours worth of work over 1.5 years. So my hourly pay plus clicking no to the ad I made $166 a hour on average.

My company’s software stopped working with Brave about half a year ago and now I use Firefox.

Brave is just too shady

It's amazing how so few people seem to understand that Brave's entire business model is an extortion racket wrapped in a crypto scam.

Of course, both that and the new bullshit described in this article is all just par for the course from the guy who (a) inflicted the abomination that is Javascript upon the world, and (b) got booted from Mozilla for being a bigot.

I found the juxtaposition of your comment to the one below yours to be pretty funny.

I have no idea how they developed such a following. They're shady AF.

Well, it doesn't help that privacyguides.org lists both Brave browser and search as recommendations.

Firefox is GOAT, but I do have Brave installed on my phone specifically for playing YouTube. The Brave browser automatically blocks YouTube ads, allows me to play videos in windowed mode, and allows me to play videos with the screen off.

I don’t do anything else in Brave, so I’ll probably hang onto it as basically a YouTube app.

Iirc the debian of browsers is iceweasle.

I use Brave occasionally, but Firefox has been my #1 for the past 100 years or so. I stopped using Firefox as my only browser after they overhauled the interface. I really miss classic Firefox with my tabs on bottom, old search engine bar, and endless customizations.

I still remember why: Mozilla fired Brendan Eich, the man who would go on to found Brave, for donating to Christian charities in the politically polarised climate of 2016. After Eich went, they also quietly purged any other employees that showed even a hint of conservative sympathies in their internet presence. They then went on to "experiment" with pushing browser ads on users, and while they eventually ended the experiment because of massive user backlash, they still made no apologies and didn't abandon the idea. Just made a final public response dripping with PR bullshit with a patronising conclusion along the lines of "internet users just aren't ready for this change yet".

Not to mention the interesting bits of info you can find just by looking into the CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich. Plenty of reasons with him alone for someone to avoid the browser and search engine.

The big one that he likes to keep buried is that he donated money to an anti-gay marriage proposition in California back in 2011, which is what caused some of the pressure for him to step down as Mozilla CEO back in 2014 after being it for a few weeks.

I don't understand this crypto auto fill thing. Can you explain it in simple terms? What is it. Why is it bad?

I had been pretty happy to find brave search as an alternative search engine, but this is kinda making me rethink using their products.. :(

It'd be cool if someone could build an open source extension for Firefox that takes their idea of using browsers as a distributed crawler, but while making it clear that a website is being crawled and not selling the data for AI training, but honestly thats just me daydreaming. I'd love an open and private search engine that isn't just a meta search :(

Edit:

Mojeek is UK based, open and private and actually have their own index, they aren't just a meta search, but they dont have much in the way of any kind of summary or highlighted answers if you're looking more for an answer to a question than the list of websites

Yep doesn't come up as much when people mention privacy, but makes decent privacy claims, and aims to build a more fairly monetized search engine by giving 90% of money from ads to content creators (no idea how that will eventually work, but its a compelling concept)

Quant seems to have decent results from my initial couple searches, but like mojeek doesn't seem have any kind of summary or answers function.

I think I'll give all three a try each time I have a difficult search task and see if any of them might be worth switching to. Right now I often have to switch over to google even from brave when I'm having a hard time finding something.

firefox is so laggy nowadays. the scrolling is also weird.

Buy brave token. It price should go up

Seriously, early on this company literally deployed a mass MITM attack against their entire userbase.

Any company that pulls some shit like that is just going to do it again whenever they think they can get away with it.

Breaking their users' trust by appending attribution tags to their URLs should've been unforgivable but I still see people pushing their browser online

At least it wasnt an NFT? ive never used brave, this is all news to me

Not supporting is one thing but being so actively against, is interesting

This is one of the most stupidest memes going around. https://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/tocqueville-on-the-freedom-of-discussion-in-america.html

I don't select a browser or any software by political preference, donde Eich departure from Mozilla it went downhill hard.

i dont agree with it but he can do whatever he wants with his money. not sure it is relevant to internet privacy tho.

People are entitled to have opinions. Even the ones you don't like.

Lynx FTW

I like to send the HTML, CSS, and JS to my laser printer personally.

I use curl to pull the text in a bsd jail running on a qemu instance running on a qubes vm and then copy it down on engineering paper and reconstruct it in my brain

Such a noob didn't even pipe it through grep to block advertising. Get outta here corporate shill.

Use a VPN, and pipe the text-only output to your printer

I groaned hearing Louis Rossmann recommending Brave during one of his videos about Youtube ads. Firefox uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock would be a better recommendation.

As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:

• Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
• Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
• Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
• Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
• Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
• DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
• Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
• Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.

I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!

I refuse to use Chrome and I use Firefox for work since 99% of my time is on that.

Got any alternatives to use?

If Brave redirecting users to use their affiliate links without consent didn't make people stop using it, I doubt this will.

On Firefox. But I do like Brave Search over something like DDG, their AI summarizer is quite good.

I think Librewolf is a much better option. BUT, I'm glad that at least Brave is taking a stance against Google. (the enemy of my enemy sort of thing). I hope all these firms are sued into following the proper copyright though.

rendering engines. I use multiple browsers depending on context

Agreed, like what do chromium based browsers really have over Firefox? Real question.

I had to use a chrome based browser on Android for a couple of weeks since Firefox had a problem. It was like a nightmare. It is common in IT history that worse quality product wins.

Think about MS-DOS. Microsoft also sold Xenix,a UNIX system that time.

Using it on Android is honestly the best experience

For me it's because Firefox is (or at least was) noticeably slower. Didn't support all the extensions I use. And didn't allow YouTube playback with audio beyond 4x play speed.

All of those items led to me to choose brave over Firefox since I encountered every one of them on a daily basis.

Also I hated the default font (or perhaps it was some other quiirk of the layout) of Firefox. I couldn't figure out how to fix it.

Convenience and performance.

I'm a dual user of Firefox and Brave on different computers. In order to separate work and personal stuff and shopping, I use different profiles. Easy on brave, needs extension with separate app on Firefox, that doesn't work on librewolf. And too often I have to stop my browsing because this Firefox setup is less stable and crashes once in a while causing annoyance.

Plus Chromecast. I like the ability to search for a video on the laptop and cast it to the TV.

It's always a balance of convenience and privacy plus ethics, can't have both.

I use FF but Chrome is objectively better in side by side comparison. It's faster, more web pages load correctly, its UX is much nicer. For most people, you just install it and go. Most people don't have the time or inclination to faff on with a browser, much less for something as poorly understood as privacy. It has features Firefox doesn't, such as tab groups which Mozilla stupidly decided to remove and no addon does the same job as well.

Mozilla just sucks, to be frank. They can't seem to have any coherent idea about what Firefox should be. The big redesign alienated a lot of the people who used it for its customisation. Adding in unwanted features like Pocket integration made people doubt the credibility of Mozilla's claims of privacy. And cockups like everyones' addons stopping working, despite being warned by the community it would happen, leave a bitter taste in peoples' mouths.

I'm assuming it's this article.

I apologize. I included an image in the submission and it seems it hijacked the URL. I've edited the submission to include the link.

They got their start redirecting ads to sponsored ads. I've never understood the love for that browser.

The browser is highly performant, contains (nearly) all necessary (usability and privacy) features and is suitable for beginners.

The search has a nice interface that is usable without javascript, has an onion site and should be low on telemetry. It also (in my opinion) has the best search results after Google. And these search results are Brave's own results, not just resold Bing results; so they're actually bringing real competition to the search engine market.

I made the move, there are mild inconveniences, but you can export your passwords, bookmarks, et al. from chrome to firefox, you can even set firefox as your primary source for app password suggestions on android. The biggest win is having UBlock Origin on my phone browser.

Hey there, I'm here to encourage to move your stuff over to Firefox. If you have your password synched with Chrome's built-in password manager, also take this opportunity to export your passwords to another password manager such as Bitwarden or KeePassXC. There are mobile versions available and they also work in apps other than browsers. Looking forward to seeing you on Firefox! :D

Just the Multi-Account containers are worth switching. That thing is a godsend if you need to use multiple accounts for one service. And to have your work stuff separate from your personal stuff. And to avoid tracking across sites.

It takes a little while to get everything moved over and working the way you want to, but for me it's the superior browser. I get better performance especially on older devices and there are a lot of core things like bookmark handling that are better on Firefox.

without attribution

no..? on every bit of info theres a source button next to it which links you to the original article, similar to what bing chat does.

Brave Software

brave search, not the browser.

Brave will become evil

The were evil since they started with all the cryptobullshit.

You must be evil to enter the crytoworld

Another case of shitification lol

You can turn these off. It's part of their crypto rewards system (you get occasional ads, some crypto and then some of it gets distributed back to the websites you vist most, or just the ones you select) so it's on by default. But you can easily opt out of this from settings.

I don't think this whole crypto system lifted off really, but it was a neat idea to reward web content creators and users, according to traffic and preferences.

That's like the whole point of brave though, you get "paid" (peanuts) for watching the ads

Those ads are the point of their business model. They show you ads, and repay you with tokens. You can gift those tokens to content creators or sell them on the market.

You can disable those, they can be set to some frequency per hour and you get paid brave attention tokens based on that

Not sure if you were aware but you are able yo turn that off.

decided to give the bat thing a go, had to sign up for this crypto thing. that is the only time I've ever been apart of a security breach